The NIH Director

A Statement from the NIH Director, Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., Welcoming
Comments on the Implementation of the Public Access Policy

March 26, 2008

The National Institutes of Health held a public meeting on Thursday,
March 20, 2008, for the purpose of hearing broad comment on the
implementation to begin April 7, 2008 of the NIH Revised Policy
on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from
NIH-Funded Research resulting from the Congressional Statute at
Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations
Act, 2008) that directed NIH to modify its current policy from
voluntary to mandatory. The meeting was open to comment from NIH-funded
researchers, representatives of universities and other NIH grantee
organizations, publishers from commercial organizations and professional
societies, journal editors, patients, public health advocates and
the general public.

NIH is applying 21st-century technology to its investment in
research, becoming more transparent and accountable, and ensuring
that NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services can better
promote the science and health benefits derived from NIH-funded
research, Zerhouni explained.

"We believe that public access after a reasonable embargo
period of up to a year to research funded by NIH will help advance
science and improve human health while preserving peer review and
the value of scientific publishing," said NIH Director Elias
A. Zerhouni, M.D. He explained that the improved access will be
a "dynamic resource to not only research publications and
display publications, but to link them to all sorts of knowledge
that NIH has invested in making research more efficient for all
scientists."

The meeting was held to ensure the policy's implementation will
work as successfully as possible for all involved. "We are
all ears," Zerhouni told the audience. "We need to move
forward and we are completely open to an interactive process here
that will take into account all input."

NIH established a voluntary public access policy in 2005, but
only a small percentage of the manuscripts submitted were deposited
under that policy. If the policy remained voluntary, Zerhouni said,
about new 64,000 journal articles arising from NIH funds would
not be available to the public each year. The revised policy implements
PL 110-161 that requires that all NIH-funded investigators submit
to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic
version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance
for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12
months after the official publication date.

The meeting was a listening session, and supported by 451 comments
collected in advance of the meeting. Preliminary analysis indicates
over 60% of these pre-meeting comments expressed support of the
Policy as implemented, but approximately 15% thought the 12-month
delay period was too long and 15% had concerns that a mandatory
policy will be detrimental to scientific publishers.

At the meeting, 25 stakeholders volunteered to speak and Norka
Ruiz Bravo, Ph.D., NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research,
closed the meeting with a preliminary analysis of the central themes
discussed. These included how author and publisher copyrights would
be managed, the speed of the implementation, the impacts of the
policy on publishers, science and health, the versions of articles
collected, the efficacy of NIH's instructions, and the length of
the delay period. Ruiz Bravo said that all of these comments would
be analyzed further and urged participants to understand that "NIH
is committed to making this policy a success for all concerned
and we want to work with all of you to get that done."

The public may view the video cast and pre-meeting comments at: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/comments.htm.
NIH is also planning a Request for Information (RFI), to be announced
in the Federal Register, asking for comments on the policy's
implementation. NIH's report on the meeting, pre-meeting comments
and the RFI will be issued by September 30, 2008.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation's
Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and
Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting
and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research,
and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both
common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and
its programs, visit www.nih.gov.